The Web's Bushiest Site

Celebrity Bar Fight is a website (located at www.celebritybarfight.com) that lets you decide who would win in a drunken bar fight between two celebrities. The site is something that my friend David and I work on in our spare time; we use it to learn, to amuse, and to have fun.

The site was inspired by a game David and I would play at the bar. We would name two celebrities, then argue about who would win in a no-rules bar fight (assuming both celebrities were in their peak condition.) This would usually entertain us for awhile, and we often ended up getting others at the bar to play along. And for those who are wondering, yes, this game was itself inspired by the conversation in Fight Club in which Edward Norton and Brad Pitt talk about which celebrity they most wanted to fight.

Yup, via a chain of events I have landed an internship at The Berkman Center, a center within the Harvard Law School. Starting June 1st I will be developing TermsWatch, a web service that will provide notification of updates to, and plain English explanations of, those Terms of Use and Terms of Service agreements (Terms) that every website and piece of software makes you consent to.

The whole thing started back in February when Facebook updated its Terms of Use. The update occurred on February 4th, but nobody noticed the changes until the 15th (keep in mind that Facebook has around 175 million active users.)

Furthermore, Facebook’s Terms of Use included an implied consent clause regarding changes. As many as 175 million users consented to the February 4th changes completely unaware that they were consenting to anything or that any change had occurred. This lack of notice presented an obvious problem, so I began to think about a program that would monitor Facebook’s Terms of Use and alert individuals when a change was detected.

Before I could begin working on the program Facebook implemented its new, democratic process for updating its Terms (now called the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.) Satisfied that notice was now being given, I joined many other Facebook users in commenting on the proposed Rights and Responsibilities. While it was great that users were given a voice in the process, it also became clear that most of us (myself included) have no idea what a lot of the language means in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, or why it needs to be included. One particular clause angered and disturbed a lot of users by allowing Facebook the right to transfer and sublicense its ability to reproduce and modify users’ content. Fortunately, a number of individuals were able to explain why such a clause is required (so Facebook can allow third party applications to access and use its users’ data.) Still, it became obvious that the dense legalese of the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities is too difficult for most (aside from experts and professionals in law) to read and understand.

It was about this time that Google started the application process for its Summer of Code. At first I scanned through the list of project ideas related to technology and society (my emerging area of interest,) but after a while I thought it would be neat to work on a generalized version of the program I had thought of in February that would monitor a site’s (or software provider’s) Terms for changes. I also thought about the difficulty of reading Terms and decided that the program would be much more useful if it included a way for legal experts to attach plain English explanations to the Terms. With all this in mind I wrote an application for the Summer of Code.

All Summer of Code programs need to be written for one of the available mentoring organizations. Since this program appeared to be a perfect fit for it, I applied with the Berkman Center as my mentor. Since I was part of last year’s Summer of Code, I figured I would easily be part of this year’s, so I sat back and waited for the good word. Less than four days after the submission deadline I got the not so good word that my application was considered ineligible. But, no sooner had I found out about the ineligibility than I received an email from the Berkman Center; they loved the idea and they asked me to apply to their internship program and spend the summer in Cambridge. Well, I couldn’t say no to that, so I applied. The process went smoothly, I was accepted, and now I am starting to pack, because I have to move in less than two weeks.

Well here it is, I finally have a home on the web. I figured I was being a pretty bad computer nerd by not having a site of my own, so I setup Joomla on my web host and started tweaking it. In the coming weeks I will be putting up information about myself: what I have done, what I want to do, and what I am doing now. And for anybody who wants to follow the happenings of Bill Bushey, I will also be using this site as a blog so you can keep tabs on what I am doing.

TermsWatch is an attempt to combine the power of knowledge and software to provide a tool that end users can use while reading and executing the Terms of Use or Terms of Service (Terms) that are typically encountered while using software or websites. Specifically, TermsWatch will aim to tackle two problems:

• Service Providers are Allowed to Change the Terms Without Notice: The majority of Terms include a clause that allows the service provider to make changes to the Terms with out notifying its users. Further, this clause usually includes wording stating that a user’s continued use of the provided service will indicate an acceptance of the new or altered Terms.
• Most Users Can Not Understand the Terms: By their nature, Terms contain lengthy, dense language that is often very difficult for common users to understand. Consequently, few users will read the Terms that they are asked to consent to. Fewer still will read the Terms and understand what they are consenting to, what rights they are giving to the service provider, and what the nature of their relationship with the service provider is.

In order to combat these issues, TermsWatch is designed to do the following:

• Monitor Terms of Use: The service will maintain a list of URLs, each referring to the web page that displays the Terms of a service provider. Periodically, TermsWatch will download these web pages and use XML parsing to extract the text of the Terms. This extracted text will then be compared to the most recent version of the Terms that is available in TermsWatch’s database. If the two versions differ, the new Terms will be saved to the database and an RSS feed, specific to the service provider, will be updated in order to alert users to any changes in the Terms.
• Store Annotations: In addition to storing the Terms of each service provider being monitored, TermsWatch will also store annotations made to the stored Terms. This would include storing explanations and comments made about a specific version of a provider’s Terms, as well as storing explanations/comments about changes that have occurred between versions.
• Expose Data Via Public API: To truly be useful, the data collected from monitoring Terms and storing annotations must be made accessible by other programs and services. To make this data accessible, TermsWatch will provide a public API that will allow for retrieval of data about a specific service provider’s Terms, such as the text of the Terms or annotations made to the Terms. The API will also allow for the creation and editing of annotations.